SSS-Ranked Trash Hero: I Was Scammed Into Being Summoned-Chapter 71: One Move Left

Hiroshi stood over Marcus with the void-blade frozen a mere inch from the man’s exposed throat. His arm was locked in a violently vibrating stalemate between two warring wills, the Monster screaming for a slaughter, and his own frayed humanity desperately hitting the brakes.

Then, something in the atmosphere shifted.

On the ground, Marcus exhaled a long, ragged breath. His violently burnt hands, which had been lying open and defenseless in the gray ash, slowly curled into tight fists.

Hiroshi felt the change before his eyes could even process it. A sudden warmth washed over the crater. It wasn’t the aggressive, pressurized, suffocating heat of Marcus’s earlier divine transformation. This was fundamentally different.

Marcus was pulling his fractured divine power inward, drawing it back from the brink.

With agonizing slowness, Marcus raised one hand. His fingers were burned down to the white of the bone in places, the surrounding skin cracked and bleeding, but the air around that ruined hand began to visibly compress.

His shattered holy weapon reformed in his grip, snapping together from motes of blinding golden light.

The very moment the weapon was whole, Marcus stopped moving entirely. He sat completely still in the blanket of ash, resembling a ruined statue of a forgotten god. Then, with the last ounce of his strength, he pointed the blade straight upward.

Hiroshi felt the sheer volume of divine mana leave Marcus in a single, total, devastating expenditure. It didn’t radiate outward gradually to warm the battlefield. Instead, it detonated upward in a concentrated pillar of blinding light that completely split the heavy smoke above the crater, slamming into the highest rubble pile like a tangible, physical force.

The sound of the eruption reached Hiroshi half a second later. It was a deep, chest-rattling, resonant crack, like a brass bell the size of a skyscraper being struck once by a titan.

Then, absolute silence fell over the ruin.

A moment later, the towering pile of rubble shifted. Dust cascaded down the slopes.

Kenji stood up.

He didn’t crawl out of the debris. His previously battered armor was entirely whole, gleaming in the settling dust. His blade was already loose in his hand. His eyes were clear, impossibly sharp, and burning with a cold, focused anger. He rolled his broad shoulders once, assessed the devastation of the crater in under two seconds, and his unyielding gaze snapped directly to Hiroshi.

Aria rose beside him a heartbeat later. The deathly grey pallor had completely left her skin. Her eyes were wide open, luminous, and terrifyingly focused. She looked down at her own hands, flexing her fingers tentatively, and the frost that immediately bloomed at her fingertips was pristine and white, there was absolutely nothing of the void’s corruption left in it.

Neither of the two heroes possessed their Avatar forms. The immense divine power Marcus had just spent hadn’t gone into a flashy, temporary transformation. It had gone entirely into pure restoration. Into a permanent, overwhelming power-up.

Behind Hiroshi, Marcus’s raised arm finally dropped. The holy weapon clattered quietly against the scorched earth. The fallen hero collapsed sideways into the thick ash and did not move again. His chest rose and fell in incredibly shallow, slow breaths, but the radiant Avatar light was completely, utterly gone from him.

Hiroshi turned.

He didn’t make the conscious decision to turn. His battered body simply moved on its own, the fading Monster within orienting automatically toward the two massive, newly restored threats. The humming void-blade in his hand had dissolved into mist sometime in the last thirty seconds. He hadn’t even noticed it vanish. His right arm now hung uselessly at his side, the skeletal, corrupted fingers twitching erratically with residual void-currents.

[Ego Integrity: 48% and rising.]

[Host reclaiming motor function. Sectors: partial.]

Hiroshi blinked, the world coming into sharper, agonizingly real focus. He had more of his own mind back than he’d possessed in hours. The Monster was still present, compressed into the dark base of his skull like a coiled, venomous spring, but it was no longer driving the vessel. He was finally back in the pilot’s seat.

He took one single step forward and nearly went face-first into the dirt.

His legs violently buckled at the knees before he barely managed to catch himself. On his back, the six ruined bone-stumps of his severed appendages scraped together uselessly, sending a sickening thrill of pain down his spine. His vision violently split for a sickening moment, doubling Kenji and Aria into four blurry figures, before brutally snapping back into true focus. The dark, purple light coursing through his visible veins was dimming rapidly, flickering weakly at his wrists and throat.

He could physically feel it happening. The power was abandoning him. It was being rapidly withdrawn, pulled forcefully back into whatever abyssal depth it had originally crawled from.

What it left behind was a fragile vessel, a body that had been put through far more trauma than a human anatomy was ever built to survive. His muscles, wherever they were still functionally human beneath the retreating void-matter, were completely shredded. His bones throbbed with a deep, grinding ache that highly suggested several of them were no longer structurally intact.

Gritting his teeth against the overwhelming agony, he forced himself to stand straight anyway.

Across the crater, Kenji hadn’t moved an inch from where he’d stood. He was silently watching Hiroshi. His sword remained at his side, not raised in an aggressive guard, but his white-knuckled grip on the hilt was absolutely ready for a lethal strike.

Aria stood a half-step behind and slightly to Kenji’s left. She wasn’t looking at Hiroshi’s face. Her icy eyes were locked onto his twitching hands, looking for the very next attack.

They were incredibly good. They were always good. But right now, they were vastly better than they had been at the very start of the fight. They had been completely restored to their absolute peak, with something heavy and divine layered underneath their auras. They harbored no injuries, suffered no fatigue, and their rigid stances made one thing perfectly clear: they were not going to let him leave this crater alive.

Hiroshi swallowed hard. He could not win this fight anymore.

An hour ago, when he was submerged in the full, unhinged depth of the void transformation? Maybe. But the cataclysmic power that had just unmade an entire army was currently draining out of him at a terrifying rate, a rate he could track in real-time.

Every single second he stood paralyzed in this ash, the power gap between him and the heroes narrowed, and then rapidly widened in the worst possible direction. In another few minutes, he would be reduced to something frighteningly close to his base human level. And his base level against two fully restored heroes who had just been handed a divine power-up by a holy weapon? That ended with him not keeping his head attached to his shoulders.

They knew it, too. He could easily see it in the disciplined way neither of them was rushing to engage. They were waiting. They were letting the invisible clock do the heavy lifting for them.

He desperately needed an exit.

He looked at the towering rubble walls surrounding them. He looked down at the fused glass floor of the crater, the utterly collapsed tunnel entrances, the sprawling debris fields trapping him in.

Nothing. It was a perfect kill box.

He looked back at Kenji and Aria. Kenji’s unwavering eyes hadn’t moved from Hiroshi’s face.

Hiroshi’s mind reached frantically backward, operating the way it always did when he was rapidly running out of viable options. He began mentally sorting through every single thing he had seen, felt, and learned since coming to this cursed place.

Suddenly, his frantic mental digging caught on a jagged edge. He found something.

It was a small thing. A highly specific, wildly unstable thing.

The corrupt power continued to eagerly drain from his heavy limbs. Seeing the fading light, Kenji finally took one step forward.

Hiroshi held his desperate thought completely still, examining it clearly in the forefront of his mind.

It wasn’t a good plan. If he was being honest with himself, it wasn’t even really a plan at all. It was a single, chaotic move. It was the exact kind of gamble you make when every single door in the building has been welded shut, the house is on fire, and you manage to find one tiny, cracked window that just might not be locked from the outside.

He exhaled slowly. A thin wisp of black, freezing vapor curled from his cracked lips, instantly dissolving into the cold, ashen air.

"This," Hiroshi whispered to himself, "might actually work."